The present disclosure relates to systems and methods for treating body tissues, more particularly to clip systems and methods for compressing body tissues.
Surgical clips are generally used during a variety of medical procedures, such as, for holding or clamping body tissues together, squeezing blood vessels or other bodily lumens to prevent bleeding, and so on. Clips may be introduced within a patient's body using various approaches such as subcutaneous approach and minimally invasive approach. In a subcutaneous approach, skin of the patient may be penetrated to enter a body lumen to clamp a clip about a target treatment site for closure. In minimally invasive approach, a clip having a pair of arms may be deployed using an endoscope introduced into the patient's body through a natural anatomical body opening such as the mouth.
Certain treatments require the deployment of multiple clips within the body. Many conventional systems deliver only one clip at a time and must be removed from the body to load a new clip which may then be delivered to a second target treatment site with this process repeated until the desired number of clips has been deployed. As a result, the deployment of multiple clips is complicated, time consuming and expensive.